I was born into a family that believed in "walk it off." We were made of lost generations of immigrants, of large families, of carefully masked features. A family where you could cry over a stubbed toe or a failed test, but nobody would cry with you. I'm not saying they don't care, but we were all raised to have stiff upper lips, and it was passed down from parent to child in every generation. Unlike some kids, my mental health was not brushed aside by my parents. I was raised with the impression that what was going on inside of my head was my own battle to fight. Intrusive and suicidal thoughts started plaguing me when I was thirteen years old. I didn't tell anyone, hoping they would go away. They didn't. The world outside of my head fell apart when I was sixteen. For so long, I had been fighting a silent battle just to stay here, and in a single moment, everything around me went up in flames like the ones that lapped at the corners of my mind. I'd always been religious but suddenly, I couldn't understand how God could let this happen to me. He'd created me, but I wasn't happy. I'd been given life but I was barely holding on to it. God had created the light to cancel out the darkness, so where was the light? After my life fell apart, I picked through the people I knew to find the ones I really cared about. Did I keep a stiff upper lip around them like I'd been instinctively raised to do? They weren't a friend. Since thirteen years old, I hadn't made any long-term goals. I hadn't expected to make it to the next month, nonetheless the next year. And yet, every birthday kept coming. I've started making goals again, even little ones for the next week. It's slow, it's excruciating, but it's progress. I don't understand the world. I don't know if I ever will. I know there's always a light, but I get stuck in the dark a lot. I know next week will come, whether or not I am here, and there's some comfort in that, because there's less pressure if the world doesn't revolve around me. The fight is still going. My upper lip is still too stiff sometimes. But tomorrow is also coming, and with it is the sun.

Darkness is not terrifying to someone who has never known light. Whether luckily or unluckily for me, I didn't know it when I was younger. I was sixteen when I met the darkness, just on the cusp of being aware of how horrible life could be but not quite ready to tip over the edge. The darkness wasn't as fast as it is for some; rather, it crept under the doors and loosened the floorboards just enough that they creaked but not enough that we would notice. When the darkness turned the lights out, even though there were signs--there are always signs--we didn't expect it. My grandpa had been fighting cancer for a couple of months, but the chemo seemed to be working, and everything was going well. Until suddenly it wasn't, and he was in the hospital. I blinked, and when I opened my eyes, the lights had been turned out. The darkness had always been there at the edges of my life, in the sort of ways that you could count its lines on my legs and the spiraling thoughts it had planted in my mind, but it had gotten a little too personal. We brushed against each other sometimes, at night or when I was in a crowded room, but it had never shrouded everything I'd known. It was there at my grandpa's funeral, sitting next to me, and it was there two days later, cuffing my wrists as I read the text on my phone notifying me that one of my only friends from middle school had died unexpectedly. I'd always been a writer and had published my first book months before the lights turned off. But you could tell, after that, how the darkness had crept in. I thought too much, surmised along with my characters. How could the world be this cruel? How could I have so much hate for something that will claim us all one day? I never spoke much, but the darkness nearly muted me. Writing was my only outlet, and so the darkness was forced to watch as all of my words spilled onto a digital page much like this one. It can't touch my writing, but just like any good friend or enemy, it's always there if you know where to look. That's why I want to go to college for biology. I will find ways to hold the darkness back for other people, to point out the creaking floorboards so the dark doesn't sneak up on them. I don't know exactly what I want to do, but I know it has to involve animals, some creatures that have made friends with the dark I hope they never know. Learning has always been my buffer against the darkness, an explanation for why it comes, and maybe my time in college will teach me not to be terrified of the darkness. There's always a light, even if you have to start a fire. This scholarship would help me pay for college so I can make a light. Thank you.

I thought my life was going to end when I was thirteen. And again when I was sixteen, I thought my life would end when my world ended because my grandpa and middle school friend died within a month of each other. Both had died unexpectedly, one from cancer, and one from a car accident. It was not an abrupt explosion of my world and what I hoped it would be, but rather a slow fissure as everything I loved cracked in half. I was lucky enough to be born into a Christian family that took me to church before I was even aware that there was a God. Until I entered high school, I had never questioned my religion or faith. Even as I struggled with crippling depression and worsening chronic pain from a genetic condition, I never questioned why this was happening. And then, just as my junior year of high school started, my grandpa’s cancer, which we thought he had been beating, began to eat him alive, so fast that we knew we couldn’t do anything. He was dead before I even had a chance to process what had happened. Two days after his funeral on what would’ve been his eightieth birthday, one of my only friends from middle school died in a car crash while I was at a bike race. Just like that, my faith was shaken. How could God take both of them like that, so suddenly and with no warning? I was angry at Him, at the world, at everyone. Looking back, I don’t understand why. I know now that there was a reason, even if I don’t know what it was. I’ve found my faith again and I trust God’s plan. That’s why I followed my dreams and published my books. I knew they could help people like me, who were struggling with depression, with anger, with grief. They’re not religious books, but I put traces of faith in every single one of them. God gave me the gift of language, and I’m proud to be able to use it to help people feel less alone. In addition to publishing more of my books, I hope to go to college and pursue either a biology or forensic career that involves animals. Through my testimony and my faith, I want to show people who are in a situation like I was in that tomorrow will come. Even if it feels like the world has ended and everything is coming crashing down, the sun will rise tomorrow, and God will still be there.

I never would've expected to have four songs on Spotify by the end of my junior year of high school. My musical journey began when I was seven and a tiny guitar was placed in my hands at my first lesson. This is where everyone expects me to delve into a world of talent and shows and a whirlwind of lessons. The reality is that I quit after about a year. I wasn't moving along as fast as I wanted to and I was hung up on the notes. That's another thing that trips people up when I tell them I play guitar: I can't read notes immediately. I need to sit down, sort them out, and turn them into tablature. When I was ten, I got a ukulele for Christmas. When I was eleven, I picked up guitar again and taught myself. When I was twelve, I got an Irish pennywhistle. Throughout the years, I've taught myself to play classical guitar, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, ukulele, mandolin, pennywhistle, keyboard, and banjo. My musical life didn't end when I dropped out of guitar lessons. It was only just starting. After taking a break, I picked up ukulele. I discovered finger styling and classical guitar, and I was hooked. With a little help from my brother, I learned how to finger style and eventually wrote some of my own songs. When I was in ninth grade, my brother and I created a shared YouTube music account where we shared our songs. I took two music composition classes in the first two years of high school before I auditioned for recording arts, a prestigious class for less than twenty students where we spend the semester making an album to publish. The audition consisted of writing a song with chords and a melody, as well as improvising a melody to chords the teacher provided. If you asked me, I would say I entirely bombed it. I messed up multiple times in the classical guitar waltz I wrote for the audition, and I played only the wrong notes in the improvisation section. To my genuine surprise, I made it into the class anyways. For the Spring semester of my junior year, I lived and breathed music. In the six songs my two groups wrote, I played classical guitar, acoustic guitar, piano, mandolin, and ukulele. I also sang in two of them. At the end of the semester, we chose two songs from each group to put in an album on Spotify. It wasn't the shock of my music being on streaming platforms that excited me. It was the validation. I'd dropped out of guitar lessons at eight. I'd self-taught myself more than five instruments. Everyone told me I couldn't be a musician because I was a quitter who couldn't make up my mind. But music taught me that changing gears isn't giving up. Experimenting and finding that you're good at multiple things isn't giving up. I was one of the most valuable musicians in the class because I could fill almost any role. And that's the most important lesson music has taught me. I will adapt.

I started biking on a tricycle before I could even walk. Throughout the years, I've dabbled in figure skating, ballet, soccer, and skiing, but only two stuck: snowboarding and mountain biking. I've been competitively involved in mountain biking since elementary school, and I've been hooked ever since. In middle school, I joined a state league that, at the time, was connected to the Arizona Cycling Association (New Mexico didn't have its own league then). In ninth grade, I won my age category in the New Mexico Off Road Series for the first time, and I got third in the Arizona state race. In tenth grade, I won the first every New Mexico Interscholastic Cycling Association race as well as the New Mexico Off Road Series for a second year in a row. My junior year of high school, disaster struck. In April, before bike season officially started, I was finally diagnosed with a connective tissue disorder. I'd always had joint problems, and putting a name to them didn't make anything worse, but it started to mentally drag me down. It was nice to know what was wrong, but at the same time, my world ended to know that I would never get better. Then, in August, early on in the season, my grandpa passed away. It wasn't unexpected, but the empty chair where he should've been watching at the finish line was. He was at every bike race the year before, waiting for me at the finish line, cheering me on as I raced. Losing him was the worst blow of the year, compounded onto everything else. I had a race the weekend after his death, and I'd been hoping to win overall for the women's category. I got third, a hard strike from reality after I'd barely missed first place overall the year before. I was stupid and hopeful anyways, thinking the season might look up. My stubborn love for my sport was holding me together. But in September, two days after my grandpa's funeral, reality struck again, harder. One of my best friends from middle died unexpectedly over the weekend, there one second, his chair next to me in class gone the next. I got third in varsity in the New Mexico Interscholastic Cycling Association races that year. After so many years of feeling strong and unstoppable, it was a hard pill to swallow. I'd always felt strong, but I started feeling weak. Even my love for the sport wasn't holding me together anymore. So, this year, I made the hardest decision I could think of and dropped out of the bike team. It was exciting, it was exhilarating, but it was stressful. Biking wasn't fun anymore because I felt like I had a lot of pressure on my head from everyone who expected me to win. This year, I only did the state series, and I won. It was a hard choice to drop the team, but it was the right one. I love the sport again, the reason I started in the first place. If mountain biking has taught me anything, it's that I have to make the right decision, not the easy one.

Jellyfish can shut down entire nuclear power plants for days, causing them to lose millions of dollars. A lot of people don't know that. In fact, most people don't seem to become unexplainably obsessed with things the way I do. That's how I started to figure out the difference between a "passion" and a "special interest." I've always had signs that pointed toward autism in blaring red lights and loud sirens. I sucked my thumb until I was eight, walked on my toes, and freaked out over the smallest changes in my plans or environment. Signs of OCD also started to show up before I was ten. My parents noted me obsessively counting my things, tapping or brushing certain objects a specific number of times, and repeatedly doing the same thing over and over again. The problem, however, is that I wasn't what people would consider organized. My version of organization was putting things where I knew they were, not putting them in orderly places. For most of my life, I was homeschooled and given enough space to study the things that interested me. I spent plenty of time in my own world reading and writing about dragons, lizards, and dinosaurs. When I entered public high school, everything changed so drastically that I contracted bronchitis from the stress. Opportunities to study my interests were blocked off by strict rubrics and teachers who wanted to make their grading process easier. It felt like another world, one that didn't want me in it. I wanted to leave for college, but I was also terrified of the extreme change I knew was coming. I'm still terrified, even more so as my imminent graduation draws ever closer. Despite my reservations, I'm determined to try it for at least a year. Even if it's not for me, I need to give myself a chance to accept the change and realize how I really feel after my initial shock. In college, I plan to study biology (or possibly forensic science). While I can't say the same thing for chemistry, I fell in love with biology in middle school. My special interest switched to jellyfish and their strangeness. I'd grown up wanting to be a veterinarian, and then a wildlife veterinarian, and then an army veterinarian (an idea barred when I got diagnosed with a disability earlier this year), and then a forensic investigator. Now, I'm not really sure. I'll just go where the waves take me, I suppose. No matter how much it feels like the world is ending, life will go on. That much I am sure of. If jellyfish can close a nuclear power plant, I can do anything.

Mountain biking, for me, is a bit of an emotional crutch. I'll be the first to admit it. Nothing else can so surely derail my attention like the rush of adrenaline that comes from knowing you could kiss a tree at any second. I've always struggled quite a bit with my mental health, especially since last year. In less than a month, I lost both one of my best friends since middle school and my grandpa. I was failing to pull through stronger, at least not in the way everyone promised I would. My biking performance plummeted, and that took a toll on my mental health as well. I'd always defined myself as a good student and a better athlete, but I was flailing along in my classes and barely pulling in median times in mountain bike races. I could lie here, say it started to look up, and tell everyone a magical rainbow sprouted from the sky, but it didn't happen like that. In fact, it got worse. I was repeatedly missing classes, getting lower grades than I was happy with, and struggling along in my favorite sport. I became obsessively wrapped up in the fact that everyone I love could drop dead at any moment. It wasn't a great time. And then I met a girl. She had been on my bike team for a while and was a few years younger than me. We weren't experiencing the exact same problems, but she was also frustrated with her biking progress. We'd both been at the tops of our categories in the last season, and we were now pulling middle-to-last place finishes. So, on a whim, we went for a ride together. She wanted to go hard on a specific hill to see if we could get the fastest time on an activity recording app called Strava. I agreed. We didn't get the fastest time, but we made it into the top ten. And every time after that, we slowly crawled our way up the leaderboard. Our performance didn't improve in the races. Maybe it was the pressure, maybe it was the courses, maybe it was all mental, nobody knows. But what's important is that we got our spark back for biking. We remembered why we liked our bike team, even if the races weren't going well. Things didn't magically look up, but I saw the glow returning to the faces of the younger girls. They were all looking up to us for guidance and motivation, and I realized we'd been letting them down. Sometimes I think the most selfless thing we can do is remember why we love something, because maybe somebody else will remember, too.

I was twelve when my "growing pains" first sent me to the doctor. I was freshly seventeen when I was diagnosed with an incurable connective tissue disorder. The day "GUTS" came out was exactly six months before my diagnosis, and I remember a distinct feeling of déjà vu as I sat in the doctor's office re-hearing a string of lyrics from "teenage dream" in my head. For years and years, medical professionals had been telling me my pain would get better, even as it kept getting worse. The line "They all say that it gets better, it gets better the more you grow" really stuck with me when I first heard it on September 8th of last year. Something not often talked about is how dismissive the healthcare scene is of teenage girls. We come in with debilitating pain and very real issues and are told it's all in our heads; it'll get better as we get older. Instead of asking questions like when the pain started, they ask if we might be pregnant or on our periods. It's horrifying, it's sad, and it's a large problem. Hearing my realizations put into song form made me realize I wasn't the only one. This dismissiveness isn't just seen in healthcare. We see it everywhere. Teenage girls are tossed aside as too emotional, too clingy, too stoic, too thin, too wide, too dramatic. It's all brushed off as something we'll grow out of, despite the fact that it may be part of us, or it may be caused by a serious underlaying issue no one bothered to address. To hear this expectation twisted into one of Olivia Rodrigo's songs hit me hard. I've listened to her music since "SOUR" came out, and it'd always been the background track playing when I wrote or exercised. When "GUTS" came out, I was excited to have new music to add to my playlist, but I didn't realize how it would touch on my thoughts and fears. "They all say that it gets better, it gets better the more you grow" may just be the anthem for girls in my generation because we're finally waking up to the fact that people expect to outgrow the things they don't like. Their thoughts are pushed on us, and when we don't outgrow our depression or anxiety or growing pains, we feel like we've become the problem. Olivia Rodrigo's song is a combatant against the fire that rages against teenage girls today. Sometimes it doesn't get better the more you grow. That's all we really wanted to hear.

By the time I was fourteen, I had written ten books; none were finished and all of them were awful. I knew the general rules of how a book operated, I just had quite a bit of difficulty implementing the “Save the Cat” model, as it’s sometimes called. Plot? Not really there. Character development? Didn’t know that was a thing. Interestingly enough, the October before National Novel Writing Month when I was fifteen was the month I had really set my mind on writing and finishing a functional book. Now, don’t ask me why it was October and not November, because I burned out during NaNoWriMo and never finished that project. So, as the universe would have it, I sat down at my computer on the first day of Prep-Tober and wrote over two thousand words that would be the start of the first book I ever published. It was a grueling process, all of it. I wrote the full book, just over fifty thousand words, in about twenty-five days, but I wasn’t done there. I was so distracted during November that I couldn’t have written more than five or ten thousand words in my NaNoWriMo project. Throughout November and December, I proofread, edited, and bought a cover from a place I’d found online. By January fourth of 2023, “Mindful” by Mercury Quinn was published on Amazon. It was a rush. It was a fever daydream. It was fantastic. I’d published my first book, and I was only fifteen? I myself couldn’t believe it. And I still couldn’t believe it when I published the next one in August of the same year. Less than two years later, I now have five books published and a sixth coming later this month. What I love so much about the process is that each book is unique. Sometimes I buy a cover and sometimes I make it. Sometimes I illustrate the book’s chapter headings or title page and sometimes I leave it wonderfully simplistic. Writing is like breathing for me. I’m not much of a talker–not much of a social person, either–but I’m very much a writer. I’ll say one word to someone who asks me a question, then turn around and spill four thousand words into an in-progress book. I was once so starved to say something that I wrote eighty thousand words in twenty-eight days. Writing feels like the voice I have trouble using. It’s a way to share all the people and things and stories that gather in fascinatingly messy tangles in my head. Without writing, they would all still be in there, stuck and knotted in a vast spiderweb nobody would see. What I think is the most beautiful, broken thing about writing is that every single piece by every single person contains some part of the author. A little snippet of their sadness, perhaps, or a small, fractured window into their soul. And that, I like to believe, is what makes writing something so fascinating and precious to me. I hold out a firm hope that I will continue to write in college, I will write wherever life takes me, and I will never stop spilling my stories onto paper. It’s a marvelous thing, to say words without really saying anything at all, and to know that somebody, somewhere, is always listening.

One in five thousand people have a connective tissue disorder that makes them quite literally fall apart; unfortunately, I am one of those people. I've struggled with hypermobile Ehlers Danlos Syndrome my entire life, but my worst symptoms started manifesting when I was around eleven or twelve. Chronic pain that started in my back and spread to my hips and knees was the first tell-tale sign, followed closely by hips that wouldn't stay in socket and other widespread, seemingly unrelated issues, like asthma, autism, and OCD. And yet, it took five years after that to get a diagnosis. Visits to physical therapy and orthopedic surgeons were useless endeavors where they suggested growing pains, anxiety, and other things they said couldn't be helped. I've struggled with health my whole life, but having doctors gaslight me out of my own condition was frustrating, especially considering how much school I had to miss for useless appointments. Growing up, I was entirely sure of what I wanted to do and where I wanted my life to go. I'd never second guessed my career path or intentions; I was dead set on going into zoological veterinary medicine and working in the field or at a zoo. Now, as I get closer to college, I've started second guessing my path more. Will my joints really be able to hold up to that kind of physical labor? How about my fatigue? Is eight years of school something that's doable with my condition and its mental and physical manifestations? I don't want to limit myself, but I also know that in many ways, I am limited. It's called a disability...because it disables me. I'm still planning on going to college for a bachelor's degree in biology, but I've decided to reevaluate my veterinary dreams when I get closer to applying to vet school. It's hard to have to lay down dreams I've had my whole life, but I need to think about my future in my own body and what that means to me. Lately, I've started thinking about what I really value. I love writing, reading, animals, and feeling involved. Maybe somewhere along the line, I'll find a job that's just what I'm looking for. I've always been an author, and I published my first book at fifteen. I love doing it, but it's not exactly what I'm looking for. I'll just have to ride the waves and see where life takes me (and hope my hips don't pop out while I'm doing it).

1 in 5000 people have a connective tissue disorder that makes them quite literally fall apart; I, unfortunately, am one of those people. Even more unfortunately, I didn't know until a few months ago. See, I have this thing called Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. My connective tissues don't really work like they're supposed to, and that kind of results in systemic failure on all levels. Personally, my joints and digestive system are affected the most. I've been on a quest for answers since my first issues started cropping up at twelve. To be perfectly blunt, quests and twelve-year-olds with chronic pain in a doctor's office don't really mix well. I had no answers, but I still had aching joints. I needed answers but everyone swore it was just normal, or anxiety, or growing pains. Finally, after dislocating my shoulder while at school and doing some research on my own, I found a doctor who actually listened and took in the whole picture. As much as I'm grateful for the chance to get a diagnosis within ten years of my symptoms first showing up (the average is 10-12 years), having what's considered a "rare" disease still weighs down on me. It's exhausting to always have to explain my condition to people who really need to know, and to find ways around explaining to people who think they're entitled to know. Constantly being in pain is a battle many adults understand but refuse to believe, because I'm "too athletic," "too smart," or, the worst, "too young." College, which I am hoping to go to and major in biology in, is going to be a big change. Coming from a small high school, a large campus is going to pose issues with my fluctuating mobility. Some days I can hike six miles, and some days I can hardly get out of bed. Additional funds like this scholarship would help me immensely in getting mobility aids that would increase my freedom. As my joints get worse and my world gets bigger, a wheelchair or crutches would be beneficial to my everyday life. The "problem" is that I want to be either an FBI agent or a veterinarian (possibly with the army), and neither of those are a career you would imagine a physically disabled person doing. So maybe it's time we change the stereotype, and maybe I'm the kind of person who wants to try and bend it. I suppose what I'm saying is that Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome sucks. But thankfully I'm adaptable and willing to break the mold. I'm going to learn how to conquer this.

“I’m terrified! Can’t you see that? Every single breath, every moment, I feel like I’m fighting for my life! I’m terrified of going so mad I don’t even realize it’s happening, of being slowly consumed by something I could never, ever dream of stopping. I’m not scared. I’m terrified.” That quote is from a book I wrote when I was fourteen. I've always struggled with my own brain, to exist in a world that doesn't give half as much as it takes. All I've ever wanted is to be happy and stay that way, but I'm not sure I know how to feel anything anymore. I used to think maybe I didn't feel happy because I felt scared, but now it seems I don't feel happy because I'm simply too numb to feel anything. Mental health has always been a battle for me because the only constant thing is my own brain, something I should be in charge of but can't seem to get under control. It kills me to know that my own problem has become someone else's. I know my mental health plays a role in my friendships, and that makes it worse. My brain makes me hate myself for something that isn't completely my fault. And even now, partway through this essay, it's coming up again. "Do I sound crazy?" "Does talking about my brain like it's not part of me categorize me as insane?" It's hard to have goals, keep friendships, and convince myself to stay alive when random thoughts pop up unexpectedly. Things don't feel real sometimes, it feels like I have nothing, and I stay quiet so I don't come across as the venting friend, but then I feel like I'm about to explode because nobody knows. I've wanted to tell them, a million times, how hopeless it feels to randomly lose all control of my own will to live. If I'm being honest, I don't think I have an understanding of the world. I don't even understand myself, most days. Sometimes I'm wondering how to live, sometimes I'm wondering why to live, and sometimes I'm wondering why I would ever not want to live. Maybe my lack of understanding is my will to live. If there's a question, I want an answer. And while I wish I could leave this essay off on a positive note, I'll just leave it on an honest note. I don't know how to live. I don't feel in control of my own brain. I don't understand the world or know what I want. But I think that's okay. I'm just learning how to be happy again.

1 in 5000 people have a connective tissue disorder that makes them quite literally fall apart; I, unfortunately, am one of those people. Even more unfortunately, I didn't know until a few months ago. See, I have this thing called Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. My connective tissues don't really work like they're supposed to, and that kind of results in systemic failure on all levels. Personally, my joints and digestive system are affected the most. I've been on a quest for answers since my first issues started cropping up at twelve. To be perfectly blunt, quests and twelve-year-olds with chronic pain in a doctor's office don't really mix well. I had no answers, but I still had aching joints. My handwriting was always praised but holding pencils for more than five minutes bruised my hands and dislocated my thumbs. It hurt my knees and hips to stand but the school chairs hurt and bruised my back. I needed answers but everyone swore it was just normal, or anxiety, or growing pains. Finally, after dislocating my shoulder while at school and doing some research on my own, I found a doctor who actually listened and took in the whole picture. Things looked up from there. People insist that diagnosing hEDS is useless since there's no cure, but the diagnosis got me the help I needed. I got ring splints to stop my fingers from overextending. I was also able to get a 504 plan that has helped me in so many ways. Now, I can take a quick walk when my joints get too stiff from the chairs, I can type things instead of handwriting them, and I have other accommodations to help ease my symptoms while I'm at school. As much as I'm grateful for the chance to get a diagnosis within ten years of my symptoms first showing up (the average is 10-12 years), having what's considered a "rare" disease still weighs down on me. It's exhausting to always have to explain my condition to people who really need to know, and to find ways around explaining to people who think they're entitled to know. Constantly being in pain is a battle many adults understand but refuse to believe, because I'm "too athletic," "too smart," or, the worst, "too young." College, which I am hoping to go to, is going to be a big change. Coming from a small high school, a large campus is going to pose issues with my fluctuating mobility. Some days I can hike six miles, and some days I can hardly get out of bed. Additional funds like this scholarship would help me immensely in getting mobility aids that would increase my freedom. As my joints get worse and my world gets bigger, a wheelchair or crutches would be beneficial to my everyday life, but the cheapest of either is at least two hundred dollars, a hefty sum of money I don't have since I can't work. So, I suppose what I'm saying is that Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome sucks. But thankfully I'm adaptable. And I'm going to learn how to conquer this.

Anxiety is the one obstacle in my life that seems, at times, insurmountable. Other things come and go, sometimes getting better, sometimes getting worse. Anxiety is always there, a steady drum pounding with my heartbeat against the backdrop of my mind, never relenting, and never slowing down. No matter what is happening, my mind is always spinning, my hands always moving, filled with too much energy that is far from the kind athletes have. Did I get that question wrong? Is this the right way? Did I remember to pack that thing I needed? Do I remember that kid's name? Is this essay good enough? Am I good enough? There's always been some thread of something hovering in my brain, ever since I was a little kid. I'd drag my stuffed animal around after me, sucking my thumb for years past most kids stop. I didn't really realize there was a word for it, the feeling of what seemed to be impending doom, a thought that couldn't harm me, but made me feel like it could. "You'll grow out of it," everyone assured me. The stomachaches, the insomnia, the panic attacks, the overstimulation in crowded settings, the pounding of my heart when someone approaches me: I didn't grow out of it. "It'll get better," everyone promised. None of it got better. In fact, it got worse. And yet, despite all that, getting a college degree has always seemed to be unquestionable. From a very young age, I knew I wanted to go to college for a biology degree, maybe go to vet school, and get a job. It wasn't until recently that the underlying doubts started playing on a loop. What if it's too hard? What if I fail? What if I can't get into college, or pay for it, or finish paying off the loans when I graduate? What if I get a degree and can't get a good enough job to make it worthwhile? What if I just can't do it? I try to tell myself these are irrational doubts, but there's not really any way of knowing, which makes me want to go even more, despite the worry that makes me fall into. The only way to prove that I'm going to fail is to at least try. I've wanted to get a biology degree before I even knew what biology was. I don't want to waste my childhood dream on a stack of anxieties that might prove themselves false. Going to college, against every thought pressing against my chest and making me lose my breath, proves that somehow, in some way, I am bigger than my anxiety.

As a freshman and sophomore in high school, my biggest focus was schoolwork and straight A's. The most important thing in my life was my future. Flash forward to now, junior year, and everything has fallen apart. I'd been trying to maintain straight A's for my future, which I had entirely planned out, but the more I think about it, the less I want to consider myself in ten years, days, or even hours. In August and September of last year, I lost both my grandpa and one of my best friends from middle school, both within a month of each other. I was devastated, because I'd been struggling with my mental health since thirteen or fourteen years old, and after my grandpa died, death was at the forefront of my mind. Then, suddenly, a friend I'd known since sixth grade died just two days after my grandpa's funeral. The worst part was, I was thinking about death when I knew he didn't want to die. I didn't know what to do with myself, because school suddenly didn't seem as important. I was struggling to get my work done and fighting with my own brain. At a loss for what to do, and with a need to get some community service hours done for National Honor Society, I signed up to make enrichment items for animals at a local shelter. The second I stepped through the door, I knew I'd chosen the perfect project. Most people hate the smell of animal shelters, and I will admit, it's not amazing, but I find it wonderfully unique. Ten pounds of dog food and a ream of paper found their way into my hands, and I was ushered back home to make some enrichment packets for the shelter dogs. As I sat there glueing together paper with kibble trapped inside, I felt an unexpected, unexplainable connection to the dogs. We were both lost, weren't we? Both trying to figure out where, or if, we had a place in this world. Suddenly feeling more vulnerable and connected to the canines at the shelter, I took a nontoxic pencil and wrote a little good luck wish inside each packet. The dogs would never be able to read it, and it would be torn up in a second. But I wanted, just for a moment, to feel like I could help those dogs find their place. I suppose my story probably isn't as impactful as others. In fact, it didn't even really have to do with humans at all. But I like to think that I made in impact in those dogs' lives. A little enrichment goes a long way, and I'd like to think that somehow, my good luck wish helped them, because those dogs sure helped me.

As a formerly homeschooled person, the lyric "I stumbled over all my words/I made it weird, I made it worse/Each time I step outside/It's social suicide" really hit hard and resonated. I was homeschooled for eight whole years, so the only people I saw most of the time were my mom and brother. On the rare occasions when I got to talk to someone else, it was a girl I'd known since I was three; my best friend happened to be my only friend. The lyric I chose resonated because it reminded me of my first day of ninth grade. After eight years of schooling at home, I was suddenly and abruptly thrown into the world of public school on my own. Without my friend, who'd gone to another school, I felt lost. What was I supposed to say? How was I supposed to act? The lyric I chose from "Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl" basically describes how my first week of public school went. I grew up without much socialization, so I had no clue how to talk to people without mumbling or having someone tell me I was weird. By the time the second week of school rolled around, stepping out of the car was something out of my nightmares. As Olivia Rodrigo best puts it, leaving the house was "social suicide." Talking to people wore me out. Pasting a smile on and pretending I knew exactly how to act was exhausting. Even the presence of so many kids near my age made me want to cry. What I'm saying is "I stumbled over all my words/I made it weird, I made it worse/Each time I step outside/It's social suicide" perfectly encapsulates my experience. The whole song "Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl" does. Not only does this song perfectly embrace the experience of a homeschooled girl stepping out into the real world, it does it accurately and realistically, hitting a little too close to home in the best way. Olivia Rodrigo's song makes me feel seen. Now, two years later, I've managed to find my place in the intricate social web of a public school, but when I listened to "Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl" in my school's parking lot the day it came out, I still connected with it. About a year ago, I learned that the way I felt about being around people was a mix of social anxiety and autism, but even so, the experience of plunging headfirst into the complex world of socialization is hard for every homeschooled kid. I'm so thankful to Olivia Rodrigo for writing this beautifully complex, real, relatable song.

Determination is kind of my thing; I'm not the kid who's popular, pretty, or a jokester. I'm the kid who perseveres. Determination and perseverance are important qualities for a person like me. I've struggled with my mental health since a young age. Autism, OCD, and anxiety affect me in more ways than anyone could imagine, so I have perfected the art of being determined. Sometimes I feel like I just want to curl up in a hole and hide for the rest of my life. Sensory issues, overstimulation, meltdowns, compulsions, and anxiety can be too much for me to handle at times. Even so, I keep pressing on. One of the hardest challenges I've faced in the past year was during mountain biking season in 2022. I was having a tough time at school, was going through autistic burnout, and was struggling to keep it all together. On top of that, I was training for the state mountain biking championships with the wrong mindset. I was determined to win when I should've just concentrated on having fun. I was struggling to motivate myself to train, struggling to motivate myself for schoolwork, and struggling to get out of autistic burnout. Things started to look up when I decided to change classes at school; I dropped a class that was stressing me out and switched it to one with a lighter workload and no grade. Suddenly, everything was looking up. My stress and anxiety levels had dropped drastically, and my performance on the bike trails had gone up. That's when it hit me: I don't have to be perfect. There's no need to go, fight, and win in a battle I don't have to do. Switching classes not only changed my performance all around; it changed my outlook on life. If I change things to suit me, rather than changing myself to suit them, I automatically accomplish the task better. With my newfound mindset, I returned to training for the state mountain biking race. With the outlook that I was working my body and getting stronger, rather than training to win, the workouts stressed me out less. The weight of expectation had lifted from my chest. In the weeks leading up to the state competition, I opted to move up a category to compete with girls older than me. Giving myself a less stressful workload in school allowed me to give myself the space I needed to succeed in biking. Fast forward to the end of the fall semester: I was the JV state champion for mountain biking and had received straight A's in my classes. All of my success started with one simple catalyst when I changed classes. A simple switch showed me that I'm in charge of my own life, rather than the other way around.

Here's a little bit of information about me: I am a sophomore in a small, rural high school situated in the mountains. I participate in a few clubs, such as English Expo, Harry Potter Club, and Student Council, and I plan on starting a snow sports club. Outside of school, I am part of a state mountain biking club (the New Mexico Interscholastic Cycling League). I compete in mountain biking at the competitive level and I won a lot of races last season, including the state championships. I really can't say if I've made an impact at my school. I'm a wallflower, and I'll admit it, but I'd like to think that I have inspired change at my high school. For one, I have inadvertently convinced teachers to alter their lesson plans to allow more flexibility for kids who have to miss a lot for medical reasons (like me), and I also convinced my art teacher to add alternatives to many of the projects for kids who are allergic to certain materials (also like me). My presence in Student Council almost certainly gives me some level of impact, too. I have more say in school decisions and a lot of friends in the club. As a small school, our community means a lot to us, so making friends and knowing everyone is very important. Even as a wallflower, being in student council gives me the chance to help run events that bring people together. As for how I have impacted my community at large? Being on the mountain biking club comes to mind. Simply just being there seems to be enough for other girls, as boys are the majority gender in the sport. My presence at practices and races is a motivator for other girls on bikes to see me out there. I'm one of the older girls on the team, which is for middle and high schoolers, so most of the younger girls look up to me, ask me for biking advice, and keep in touch with me during the offseason. It's amazing to watch them honing their biking skills each week as they ride harder things faster and faster. And it's even more amazing to know that I helped with that. I'm impacting my community person by person, one girl on a bike at a time. Each girl I ride with is an individual to me, a piece in the community but so much more than that at the same time.